Welcome to the newsletter. I write here to help parents and therapists apply discernment, wisdom, and compassion to the care of young people with gender distress.
Need immediate strategy? Book a 1-1 Consultation
Need community & expert guidance? Join Sasha’s Parental Confidence Lab
Just reading? Become a paid subscriber here to support my writing.
It seems that when young people socially transition to live in a different gender role, they are more likely to later pursue medical transition as well. Skeptics of the cultural directive to raise children as the opposite sex or to affirm a transgender identity typically point to the health risks involved with medical transition. Some who are concerned also highlight the psychological confusion a child or adolescent may experience if they’ve been told they can simply change sex by declaration or physical intervention.
While these are valid reasons for concern, there’s another form of damage to the child that receives far less attention. In many instances, when families feel pressured into gender affirmation, a fundamental injury occurs in the abandonment of parental authority.
However, it is entirely false to assume that every instance of parents affirming an adolescent and agreeing to his or her social transition necessarily constitutes an abandonment of parental authority.
In fact, given how vocal I’ve been about the need for caution and restraint in how we approach gender-questioning youth, affirming parents who regret their decisions are often surprised by my reassuring and hopeful approach to their current situation. In this essay, I’ll explain how families who believe that affirming was a mistake can understand the role of parental authority in their dynamics. I’ll describe what it looks like when parental authority is robust and healthy and what it looks like when it’s in short supply. Finally, I’ll offer ways parents can meaningfully steer in a new direction and communicate these shifts effectively to their child.
What is parental authority?
To understand parental authority more deeply, let’s return to research on parenting styles conducted by developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind. She described the act of parenting across two key dimensions: responsiveness (warmth, empathy, emotional attunement, and curiosity) and demandingness (structure, behavioral standards, setting the pace, and holding firm boundaries). Today I’ll refer to these as warmth and structure. Her research identified four parenting styles that utilize varying degrees of warmth and structure. Baumrind found that parents who engaged their children with a high degree of both (she called this Authoritative Parenting) tended to raise kids who were well-adjusted, confident, cooperative, skilled at managing their emotions, academically successful, and socially connected through healthy friendships. Authoritative parenting should not be confused with Authoritarian parenting, which is characterized by low warmth and high structure. This Authoritarian style, in its extreme form, can be forceful, punitive, or compel obedience through fear.
I think of parental authority as the active stance and embodiment of Baumrind’s high-warmth, high-structure Authoritative parenting style. This warm and boundaried posture allows parents to guide their child in age-appropriate ways because they cultivate a strong attachment. When holding parental authority, a mother or father maintains a caring, steady, and confident presence. Parents erect guardrails and hold expectations that keep their adolescents safe while navigating a turbulent developmental period. They also show respect for their child’s perspective, engage with curiosity and take seriously their emotions and experiences. While compromises or negotiation are sometimes utilized, parental authority usually makes mom or dad the final decision maker.
Parents who regret some or all aspects of social transition typically feel highly ambivalent about the direction things are headed with their teen, especially as requests or demands for medical intervention become a point of contention. But the fact of social transition tells us very little about the relational dynamics and expression of parental authority that is taking place in the family.
Undermining Parental Authority
Now we’ll look at precipitating events and contexts that impact the parent’s ability to hold a high-warmth, high-structure stance. Factors that undermine parental authority are often ones that create a great deal of panic, undermine parental confidence, and muddy clarity and parental intuition. In my experience, the following contextual, social, and psychological pressures are common, though this is not an exhaustive list:
Socio-Political Bubbles: In many social environments, youth gender transition is so common that immediate affirmation is treated as the default, compassionate response. Parents often adopt this stance without recognizing that there are other options and without understanding that social transition can set a rigid trajectory toward medical decisions.
External Authority Pressure: Strong directives from therapists, medical providers, or school authorities can carry immense weight, leading parents to override their own intuition and reluctantly comply.
Crisis Mode: In the wake of a child’s self-harm, suicidal statements, or extreme emotional dysregulation, parents enter a crisis management mindset. In this high-stress state, the long-term implications of social transition are eclipsed by the immediate desire to minimize harm to the child. Long-term considerations only surface after the emergency is stabilized, leaving parents increasingly unsettled.
Conflict Avoidance and Anxiety: Whether due to the previous three pressures, a child with a generally volatile and challenging personality, or the personal histories of the parents themselves, fears and anxieties about direct confrontation can lead parents to reluctantly affirm their child’s gender. Often, parents hold internal scripts about the child’s fragility and fear that saying no may damage their bond or derail their child’s precarious development.
Parental Alienation or High-Conflict Co-Parenting: In high-conflict divorce dynamics, children frequently become proxies for parental outrage and disdain. In these devastating scenarios, the affirming parent may actively encourage the child to reject or disparage the other parent’s caution surrounding transition. The hesitant parent is placed in an impossible bind, fearing custody disputes or total alienation if they do not go along with social or medical transition. These cases are uniquely complex and warrant an essay of their own, so I will not focus on them further in this piece.
Now let’s turn our focus to gender affirmation and how it may look in two different contexts: one in which parents hold a good deal of health parental authority and one in which parents struggle to hold their parental authority.
Holding Authority While Affirming Your Child
Some parents, while facing some of the pressures discussed above, have chosen to take an affirming stance regarding their teen’s trans or cross-sex identity. They have considered their options, and decided to make compromises with their child. Their attitude and leadership is perceived by their teen as calm, confident, and intentional. These parents tend to adopt a proactive and curious stance around the topic of gender and transition. They will engage in open conversations with their child about identity, explore the practical implications of social transition, and candidly discuss the logistical, medical, and social hurdles involved.
Crucially, these parents continue to hold high expectations regarding other key adolescent milestones and responsibilities—such as chores, hobbies, grades, and household contributions. While such parents may earnestly believe that affirming is what preserves the relationship, I believe the bond remains intact not because of the names and pronouns used, but because the parents have maintained their position as the steady, secure adults in charge. They don’t claim to have every answer, but they accept the responsibility to steer the ship, and that stability makes the child feel safe. Even if these parents experience some of the same anxieties and uncertainties as others, they recognize that their job is to balance giving their teen some autonomy while retaining the final say on how the family will proceed through this process.
In my experience, parents in this first camp typically reach out after experiencing an “oh shit” moment. They initially followed provider guidance toward literal affirmation, intending it as a gentle gesture of goodwill. But over time, they watch what started as supportive exploration escalate into aggressive demands for medical transition. When these parents consult with me, they are usually discovering for the first time that there are differing perspectives on how to care for a dysphoric teen. Learning that there were other ways they could have been responding in prior months or years, they come to have intense regret about their previous decisions. They feel as though the damage is done, the narrative is locked in, and they have lost any chance of steering their child in a healthier direction.
However, because these parents already hold a good deal of authority with their child and maintain strong, connected relationships, the opportunities to keep the conversation going, introduce a new perspective, or adjust how they navigate their child’s gender distress remain entirely open and viable.
I often tell these parents: “Had we met at the beginning of this process, I would have suggested a different approach. But by staying connected and engaging proactively with your child, you’ve actually set yourself up in a strong position to begin making meaningful changes today.”
Struggling to Hold Authority While Affirming Your Child
On the other hand, I’ve met many families who have also been using a new name and pronouns or engaged in social transition for some time, but arrived at these decisions through a very different pathway. They operate from a distinctly reactive stance—one characterized by conflict avoidance, fear, and uncertainty. Unlike proactive parents who regularly initiate open, grounded conversations about gender with their teen, reactive parents never raise the topic themselves. They exist in perpetual firefighting mode: scrambling to manage acute emotional crises or reacting to immediate demands as they arise, but otherwise avoiding the subject entirely out of dread. In this posture, rather than leading with adult authority, parents often feel disempowered, impotent, and helpless in the face of the child, the clinics, or other figures in the family’s life.
By leaving the topic untouched until the child brings it up, parents inadvertently hand over complete control of the narrative and the timeline. They may also feel unsure of what they believe regarding the possibility that their child may be “truly trans,” bearing immense anxiety that if they intervene, initiate dialogue, or set the pace, they will irreparably damage their child’s identity development, create deep mistrust, ruin the relationship, or increase their child’s risk of depression, self-harm, or suicide. It is no wonder that under these terrifying perceived conditions, such parents find themselves completely at the mercy of their child’s distress and unpredictability.
In many cases, these parents are so overwhelmed by their child’s volatility—and their own emotional dysregulation—that their primary experience is one of having been worn down, or even bullied, by the young person (and at times, the young person’s care team). In severe instances, this dynamic borders on emotional abuse, where the adolescent wields that control in a condescending or cruel manner. Frequently, parents have been operating in this state for so long that when I point out how much power their child actually holds in the relationship, they express profound relief—as though someone has finally named the helplessness they’ve been bearing in silence.
Beyond the hostility in the home, these parents carry the suffocating weight of hiding what they truly believe. Living in a state of constant pretense—holding back their genuine thoughts, walking on eggshells, and pretending to agree with choices they secretly oppose—is a soul-crushing and destructive experience. This posture of self-silencing makes it virtually impossible to project a warm, confident, or steady parental presence.
Parents who operate from this disempowered position rarely see the promises of a happier, healthier child come to fruition. Contrary to popular belief, the act of affirming itself is not the deciding factor. It is the posture, attitude, and manner in which parents engage with the process that makes the real difference. When well-intentioned adults abdicate their guiding role on issues as consequential as social and medical transition, they often believe that relinquishing control will dissipate their teen’s anxiety and angst. In reality, handing this degree of choice to a distressed adolescent creates an unstable free-fall, depriving the young person of any solid foundation to grasp onto.
Instead of restoring peace, power granted to an adolescent invariably increases their anxiety. Minor lapses from the parent—a slip of a pronoun or a momentary hesitation—are frequently met with intense hostility, because the child’s forcefulness has been repeatedly rewarded while the adults have failed to lead or stabilize them. Teens who hold too much power simply do not thrive. Deprived of a stable adult anchor, they feel deeply insecure and are left with no choice but to continuously perform a rigid, forceful confidence. Reclaiming leadership for the disempowered parent is a challenging task that requires a great deal of resolve, but it can be transformative—not only in their role as a parent and their relationship with their child, but in helping them grow into someone who can stand calmly and confidently in their own skin, make meaningful decisions, and lead with greater conviction.
Course-Correcting: Strategic Guidance for Both Stances
So far, I’ve outlined two distinct stances: one of deliberation, intention, and thoughtful compromise, and another of powerlessness, terror, and being bulldozed by the child or external figures.
In consultations, after parents have laid out their story, I often have a clinical hunch about how things might have unfolded if A, B, or C had been tried. However, the truth is, nobody can know for certain how a different choice would have played out. Many parents find themselves looking around, asking: How did we end up here—calling our child an unfamiliar name, walking on eggshells about how we really feel, and unsure of how or if we can ever regain our footing?
Endless woulda, shoulda, couldas will not serve you now. All you can do is engage with the reality of your current circumstances and decide where you need to adjust things, starting today.
Regardless of which trajectory brought you to this point, my core message to parents experiencing regret remains the same: There is still a tremendous amount you can do, but your entry point depends entirely on the current state of your relationship and your posture in the home.
If you are a proactive parent whose relationship with your teen is warm, connected, and engaged, you can draw directly on that existing trust to introduce direct guidance, explore alternative perspectives, and slow down or redirect the current trajectory.
If you are a reactive parent whose home feels volatile, tense, or governed by walking on eggshells, your task is different. You cannot skip straight to negotiating the nuances of gender. Your first step is to restore your own internal stability and reclaim your adult posture—because rebuilding a secure relationship requires a calm, grounded parent who chooses to lead, even if they are afraid.
For the Proactive Parent (Building Upon Your Credibility)
If you affirmed from a place of warmth, connection, and sustained parental leadership, your initial decision to affirm does not have to be a fatal error. Looked at through a different lens, that gesture can be reframed to your advantage:
Follow-Through with Genuine Credibility: By affirming initially from a place of love and respect, you demonstrated that you aren’t simply an adversary trying to challenge their emerging identity. Your child likely views you as an ally. That goodwill gives you immense credibility! Remember that a teen who trusts you is far more inclined to hear you out when you introduce new perspectives, express thoughtful concerns, or offer creative alternatives for resolving their emotional distress.
Frame it as a Point in Time, Not an End State: You can explicitly frame your past decisions as something you did based on what you knew then. It is completely natural for a parent to say, “I wanted to support you, and I still do, but as I’ve learned more and seen where this is heading, I have some new important reflections we need to talk through together.”
Shift Perspectives Without Panic: Reclaiming authority isn’t about pulling the rug out overnight in a fit of fear; sudden reversals usually trigger defensive panic. Continue to hold firm boundaries around broader adolescent expectations while slowly introducing nuance, curiosity, and productive friction around the medical narrative.
For the Reactive Parent (Reclaiming Your Authority)
If you affirmed out of fear, crisis, or feeling bullied, your task is not to immediately debate the identity content with your teen. Your work is about correcting the power imbalance and establishing your position of loving parental authority:
Commit to an Internal Reset: Before you can change household dynamics, you must step back, seek your own clinical or coaching support, and clarify your core values. You cannot lead your child out of chaos if you are operating from the same panic that animates their distress.
Develop Emotional Regulation: Disempowered parents are frequently held hostage by the fear of their child’s emotional explosions. Learning to tolerate your child’s distress—and regulating your own anxiety when they lash out—is the single most crucial skill needed to stop walking on eggshells.
Don’t Just React; Be Deliberate: Reclaiming leadership requires shifting from a purely reactive posture (scrambling to answer to the latest demand) to a grounded, proactive stance. Ultimately, teens feel more secure when they sense their parents calmly stepping up into the adult role, even if they initially test that boundary with hostility. Focus first on building your internal stability and truly deliberating about what is needed before you make any sweeping policy changes.
Every parenting decision carries trade-offs, and you wouldn’t have affirmed in the first place unless you believed it offered some benefit; even if only to keep the peace or protect your child from harm. But recognizing that things have drifted in a direction that no longer feels right does not mean you are out of options. If you can look at this a different way, you’ll see an invitation to lean in, re-engage, and start having different conversations.
When parents seek my help to re-orient, they often arrive after attempting a copy-paste script or following a rigid playbook. But after working with over 1,000 families over the past decade, I’ve learned that formulaic approaches and one-size-fits all courses often fall short—and sometimes, they make things worse.
Before every consultation, I have parents go through a detailed intake process to paint a clear, comprehensive picture: your child’s temperament, family communication patterns, and the underlying emotional dynamics at play, to name a few. It takes time, effort, and discernment to ask the right questions and gather both the subtle and significant details. But in my experience, this is the only way to build a tailored strategy that feels truly resonant and doable for your family. If you’d like individualized help thinking through your next steps, you can learn more about booking a clinical consultation here.
Always such excellent writing on such important topics Sasha! Thank you! It feels good to know reading your work, that we navigated our daughter’s dysphoria, with a good skill set. And that she came out the other side whole and well.
How about an adult child who lags behind in general maturity, but yet lives independently away from the parents? How do we maintain a “non-eggshell-walking” relationship?